Category Archives: DellEMC

With VMworld 2018 around the corner, everyone out there wants to have a productive event.I often get asked by customers, what sessions do you recommend.

The fact is , all of our customers are at different stages of their digital transformation and approach of single size fits all doesn’t work .

Who is driving this transformation , of-course “Business needs” are driving the outcomes for all enterprises.

Businesses are looking towards “Speed to Market” , forcing internal IT to bridge the gap and be service provider to business , similar to a Public Cloud Provider, the approach that drives internal IT to adopt “Software Defined Data Center” and a clear Multi-Cloud Strategy.

Enterprises while competing with Startups are creating a culture of “Startups in the enterprise”, focusing on reducing the technical debt, application modernization,creating competitive advantage with “Software”.

As Highlighted by Forrester Research, “every company is in the software business.”

In a world that is changing at breakneck speed, the ability to identify and respond to digital innovation opportunities more quickly than your competitors will determine if your company sinks or swims.

This new paradigm shift in the world meant a change not just for Operators but Developers. For Developers , that speed is driven by Appdev transformation , Monolith to Micro-services,Cloud Native Platforms, CaaS,FaaS (Serverless) leading to not just Multi-Cloud but Multi-Platform enterprise strategies.

Every enterprise is at different levels of transformation at realm of Multi-Cloud and Multi-Platform adoption.

Here is a look at their priorities over the next one to two years (Multi-Platform CF report June 2018) :

The adoption of containers and questions like “Will Containers take over VM’s” have already been answered ? They drive organizations on their cloud journey a way to test out cloud-native technologies, for example building in continuous delivery practices and refactoring applications. For example, companies using containers can orchestrate them with the much-discussed Kubernetes, which IT Decision Makers rank as the top orchestration tool, overtaking Docker Swarm for the first time on container orchestration tools.

Let’s discuss where are containers in the eco-system of technology, from the same report

We can clearly see, broad deployments trending across containerization followed by CI/CD ,Cloud Native platforms and Serverless.

The crux is the fact that “Every Enterprise either has a Multi-Cloud and Multi-Platform Strategy” or is planning one.

Rolling the discussion back to the topic, I consider this VMworld to be a differentiated one. VMworld has mostly been focused around Multi-Cloud Strategy , IT Operators but the current one surely has great technology led discussions for Developers with huge presence of Pivotal and providing them what they need to just focus on their Developer Productivity with PAS and PKS.

Here is a quick draft of sessions which you will see huge value based on the above discussion for your enterprise .

– Kubernetes On Fire (One of the Favorites) :

How do we take our Kubernetes workloads to production? Pivotal Container Service, PKS (Managed Kubernetes) is a popular option – come learn why! Pivotal’s Sr. Director of Technology, Cornelia Davis, showcases PKS customer stories and the security, isolation, and high availability of K8s clusters.

When: Sunday, August 26, 2:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. | #CNA1780QU

The ability to #DevLikeaStartup sounds nice, but executing the seamless capabilities associated with rapid CI/CD deployment is challenging in a worldwide enterprise with strong data gravity and compliance mandates. If you ever are the one to lose sleep over how to maintain controls while providing developers the freedom to code and use Kubernetes, this session is for you. The question enterprises would want to know how can they leverage existing VMware investments to implement PKS.

When: Wednesday, August 29, 1:50 p.m. to 2:10 p.m.

–Real-World Stories from PKS Customers :

Existing customers discuss their successes, their challenges, the unique company demands and hurdles they jumped through to reach their goals. For those of you serious about bringing Kubernetes containers to your IT environment, this panel session is a must-see.

When: Monday, August 27, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. | CNA1199PU

– Automate Everything, Cars, Trains, NSX and CNA :

As we saw above, automation is key to businesses to drive innovation.This session is to discuss automation of the platform using CI pipelines with Concourse to automate NSX, PKS and Pivotal Application Services.

– Wells Fargo Discusses Security with Pivotal Cloud Foundry :

Security being Key to success of our enterprises, Leaders from Wells Fargo will offer their story how they tackle compliance while managing the daily needs of a business with speed and agility.They will discuss how PCF enables them to fend off cyber attacks that threaten their business.

Time: Wednesday, August 29, 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. | #CNA1464BU

– Demos & Hands-on Labs with Pivotal :

How does PRA Pivotal Ready Architecture (Framework of best of breed technologies and best practices to deploy PAS and PKS) ,concrete plan for how Kubernetes, NSX-T, vSphere, PKS and Pivotal Ready Architecture fit into your IT strategy.

Overcome the challenges with a Scalable and repetitive architecture for the enterprise, providing IT Operators the speed what business needs.

Dive into product architecture and perform LIVE demos at the booth, and offer four 5-minute talks throughout the day where you can hear about customers who have installed PRA and PKS.

VMworld also offers Hands-on Labs (HOL) which allow you to get in the driver’s seat to build ,test and deploy.

– NSX Container Networking for Pivotal Application Services

NSX is Key to Multi-Cloud and Multi-Platform strategy for our customers ,this would provide great insight to container Networking.

This session is focused on lessons from the field , the speakers have been involved in drafting cookbooks for NSX-T and PKS based on their experiences with customers.Don’t miss it !

Tuesday 28th Aug , Mandalay Bay L, Level 2, 3:30 – 4:30pm

– Operating and Managing Kubernetes on Day 2 w/ PKS

This session is the “know-hows”of our enterprise which lies in the success of managing Day-2 operations of the platform (Upgrades or should i say rolling upgrades, Patching).The speakers from the product management have vast experience of enterprise customer needs and what a successful platform would look like , encompassing the current challenges of dev’s and operators.

A lot has been already discussed , spoken and written about VMware on AWS re-invent 2017 announcements , a quick look on the announcements and impact it’s already having in some of my customer discussions ….

VMware Cloud™ on AWS is expanding availability from the U.S. West (Oregon) region to also include the AWS U.S. East (N. Virginia) region, and includes additional VMware capabilities and support for more AWS services, making it even easier for customers to move, run, and protect mission-critical applications at scale. Customers can now create VMware SDDCs in AWS US East (N. Virginia) region.

DRaaS : This use case is critical for customers , highlighting some of the use cases i see

Customers already using VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) and vSphere as their core technology with all their people and process for their Business Continuity and DR.The DR site Hardware is up for maintenance and they don’ t further want to maintain the DR site.This was a perfect use case for this customer, with assessment of moving the DR to VMC , we showed the customer the value of moving the DR,keeping in view of no changes required on their people,process and methodology.

For some of the customers, having only single site and had been in planning phase to add DR , this announcement came at right time.

In my role, i meet diversified customers with different use cases and it feels great to provide our customers the choice.The question of mobility or should i say ” Challenge of Hybrid” for the obvious reasons of

Multiple Machine formats (Across on-prem and off-prem)

Skill-sets and tool chains

Networking and security

Operational Inconsistency

Monitoring and Reporting across the environments

I have been in discussion with a customer for long enough where a use case of application mobility with above technology meet the needs.Customer is into a business which seems huge spikes during festive season like Black Friday,Christmas,New year.Under such scenario, where customer shouldn’t be buying hardware just for this spike, the best approach presented was

The production and dev environment running on VMware and VxBlock (DellEMC’s Converged platform), having Compute blades and Storage.

Production environment needs extensive compute power and the best possible approach for this customer was to move the dev environment to VMC (VMware on AWS) as the festive season approaches .

This gives production environment all the compute for expansion.

This approach was presented to customer with a assessment report based on the outcomes,cost of running dev at VMC during the time-frame https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2017/08/vmc-assessment-with-vrbc.html VMC assessment helped customer to identify the costs of migrating dev applications clusters / VMs from private cloud to AWS. Above screenshot provides an example of the overview on the assessment giving customer the end-state of VMC . A minimum of four hosts is required for VMware Cloud on AWS. Blue region on the hosts indicates the utilization level for the workloads to be migrated. The monthly costs for VMware Cloud on AWS are shown both in terms of utilization and total purchase costs. 1-year and 3-year subscription costs are added to the VMC assessment to help customers make informed decisions.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhCvGVtEdDc

Along with the VMware Cloud on AWS costs, the private cloud costs are shown with respect to actual and standard utilization. Standard utilization is based on running the infrastructure at optimal levels.

I would be further extending the use cases in the coming posts, result of my customer interactions and discussions.

Importantly, multiple ways to consume VMware Software across the clouds, be it VVD (Vmware Validated Design, Custom Cloud (BIY) or SDDC vCF (VMware Cloud Foundation) are playing an important role, across on-prem and off-prem .

De-Coupling Hardware and Software

Intelligence driven by the software

Engineered integration of the entire software-defined stack

Software lifecycle management that automates day 0 to day 2 operations